Lin-Manuel Miranda faces an adoring media contingent in Brisbane.
In two months’ time, Hamilton, the greatest musical of the 21st century, will make its New Zealand debut. Two weeks ago, its creator and creative genius Lin-Manuel Miranda travelled to Brisbane to get his first glimpse of the Australasian cast performing it. Greg Bruce was there to meet him.
Many of the journalists prefaced their questions with expressions of fandom (“Big fan”/“Massive fan”, etc) and one journalist tried to ask his question in a Miranda-style rhyme he’d written, but he got overexcited, fudged it and Miranda had to ask him to repeat it, then started answering before the journalist had finished, so the whole thing was generally very awkward.
There is more than one reason for the level of maniacal fandom Miranda inspires (organisers of the Sunday morning Q&A received 30,000 applications for the 1800 free tickets), but the main one is Hamilton, a musical containing many innovations, including telling much of its story in rap and using an almost entirely non-white cast to tell an all-white story in an overwhelmingly white artform, while ultimately delivering a work of genius, and not in some abstract “artistic quality” sense, but in an “I am instantly and intensely in love with everything about this” sense. As one reviewer wrote, “The first half of Hamilton alone contained more bona fide bangers than Lloyd Webber wrote in his career.” It is not an exaggeration to say that, with Hamilton, Miranda changed the face of the musical.
Since its debut on Broadway in 2015, Miranda has also become one of the world’s most sought-after movie songwriters, creating the songs for films including Moana, Vivo and Encanto. Among his hits are the massive Billboard Hot 100 number one and debilitating earworm We Don’t Talk About Bruno, and the Moana hits You’re Welcome, We Know The Way and How Far I’ll Go.
He’s won five Grammys, two Emmys, three Tonys, a Pulitzer Prize and has been nominated for two Academy Awards. He’s been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant and appeared in the Time 100 as one of the world’s most influential people. He’s now such a big part of the culture, his style so entrenched, his music so catchy and omnipresent, he’s become a true cultural-historical figure, destined to be remembered decades from now, and possibly beyond. He is a true artistic genius.
I first became aware of his talent when I saw a YouTube clip of his performance for Barack and Michelle Obama at The White House in 2009, by which time he had already attained fame with his first Broadway musical
In The Heights. I remember also the hype about Hamilton in 2015 when it first appeared on Broadway, but it wasn’t until 2020, when a filmed version of the stage production appeared on Disney+ that I was able to see for myself the extent of his talent. To be clear, I didn’t really want to watch it, because I assumed a filmed version of a musical would lose most of its power, and because it was three hours long, but my wife pestered me for weeks until, one Sunday night, I finally gave in. I sat on the couch with no enthusiasm and much resentment, however, just a few bars into the opening number I found myself sitting up straight, aware that something special was happening. By the end of the third song, My Shot, I was punching the air. In just those few minutes, before my eyes, I had seen the form of musical theatre turned upside-down.
From there, it got better. It wasn’t just the rapping, although the rapping was brilliant. It was the storytelling, the musicality, the catchiness of the songs, the rousingly relatable messages (“I am not throwing away my shot!”) of a main character who was going at life full on, and the awareness the show’s creator was doing the same, and that both had changed the world, and it was the way all these component parts meshed into one powerful and inspiring whole.
The next day, and for months to come, I streamed the original cast recording of Hamilton whenever I could – at home, at work and everywhere in between, occasionally punching the air, often close to tears. The songs segued easily between anger, comedy and beauty, and every time I played them I understood that to listen to the work of Miranda was to be in the presence of greatness.
Two weeks ago, on a Saturday, I entered the lift of Brisbane’s most opulent hotel and watched as one of the three publicity people accompanying me pressed the button for the top floor. When the doors opened, I walked out and waited to be shown the way to his room, but there was no need, because we were in his room. The lift had opened directly into one of Australia’s biggest and most spectacular penthouses, 786 square metres of purest opulence, featuring not just its own infinity pool but also its own pyjamas; the sort of place you too would want to spend the night if you had a spare A$25,000.
My eyes were still drunk on the glamour of it all when my ears notified me of the beautiful music, which sounded like some spectacular concerto I had never before heard. As I rounded the corner, I discovered the sound was coming from the hands of one of the 21st century’s greatest musical geniuses, striking the keys of the penthouse’s baby grand. “Oh, hi!” he said, jumping up and shaking my hand, “Sorry, I was just noodling.”
“Surely not,” I said. “Surely that was a fully realised piece of music.”
“Oh no, not at all,” he said, ushering me the many, many miles of floor space to the couch, all the while comparing his noodling unfavourably to that of other musicians I’d never heard of.
He flopped on to the couch, tucked his legs up under him and rested his head on his hand. I had 15 minutes.
Ostensibly it was an interview, but it felt bigger than that, in a way I couldn’t articulate, or even really understand. It seemed loaded with potential – in the presence of genius, anything could happen. Sparks might fly off him and land on me and be fanned into something life-changing, or at least burn me alive. I tried and failed to get my head around what was going on inside me. A few days earlier, I had asked my wife how I might use the interview to make my life better. She furrowed her brow and told me that was a terrible way to think about it.
Prior to my interview with him, many people had told me what a great opportunity it was, but no one ever said exactly what that opportunity was. It couldn’t just be about whatever he was going to say, because it was unimaginable he could say anything he hadn’t already said in the thousands of interviews he’d already done over the course of his career. Even if, by some miracle, he did say something new, it’s doubtful it would have been enough to fill a single column, let alone a multi-page feature article in the country’s leading newspaper magazine (Voyager Media Awards 2022). Besides, his most powerful words, and the ones that have inspired so many people to rise to their feet, whistling and whooping, over the last eight years, are not the ones he’s said privately to journalists far better than me, but the ones that are available to anyone with an internet connection and access to Spotify or Disney+.
What is it that people find so special about the idea of sharing a room with such a genius? Breathing the same air? Having him hear and respond to your words? Touching your hand to his and pumping it up and down? Seeing his hair in real life? As I sat down next to him on the couch, I still hadn’t figured it out.
I had spent many hours over many weeks thinking up possible questions. The one I chose to open with was: “How are you doing?”
Two hours later, I looked down from the balcony in Brisbane’s Lyric Theatre, as a side door opened and he walked into the auditorium to take an inauspicious seat among the masses in the stalls. At his appearance, the audience went very quiet, then, very quickly, very loud. Everyone, including me, rose to their feet screaming and whooping and whistling for a very long time. I looked at the excitement on the faces of the people around me, as they expressed their joy at the arrival of a man I had sat quietly next to on a couch two hours prior.
Before I’d met him he’d seemed so big, then, when I was sitting next to him on his couch, he hadn’t, but now once more he did. I tried to run some mental calculations about the power of one person to move so many others, and not just in some abstract emotional sense, but physically – his work had compelled these 2000 people, and many millions of others over the past eight years, to leave their couches, homes, cities and even countries to sit in a theatre for three hours, then to go home and tell everyone they know that they must do the same.
During the wildness of the ovation at his entry, I felt an urge to say to the people around me: “I was talking with him on a couch in his hotel room two hours ago.” I assume that urge was about ego, about making me feel special and important, and in the end, I didn’t do it, which in retrospect was the right decision.
He told me he isn’t a genius but someone who found his lane early and worked his ass off. He told me a cute story about the first time he took his 5 year old to Hamilton and how that 5 year old started falling asleep during the song Dear Theodosia, because it was his bedtime song. He told me his 8 year old son won’t let him sing or even hum in public. He told me his day-to-day life is getting his kids out the door in the morning, then getting home by three for when his son gets home from school and making him do his homework, and finding time to write songs in the gaps.
But those are just the things he said and what people really want to know, when you tell them you met a genius, is what he was like. I had 15 minutes with Lin-Manuel Miranda and a job to do, which required me to solicit from him as many interesting comments as possible, to share with you in this article. Because of his importance and the interest in him, and the time constraint, I felt great pressure to do a good job and to not let anybody down. It was only once the job was over, and the pressure off, that I felt able to reflect on our meeting and to think about abstractions like what he was like and so it is that I can tell you he was polite and nice and answered my questions genuinely and generously, despite having answered variations of all of them many times before. The best thing about having met a world-famous genius is having a story to tell about the time you met a world-famous genius. The worst thing is when your story doesn’t do justice to the subject.
When one of the publicity people called time on our 15 minutes, Miranda and I rose from the couch and crossed the room, then, without warning, he sat down at the piano and said, “I’ll play you out!” The music was instantly evocative and moving. I felt like the luckiest person in Brisbane. I pressed record on my phone so I would always be able to remind myself of the moment, but then I started thinking about how to write about it in this article, so I shouted, “Can you annotate it?” Then, when he didn’t reply, “Some lyrics?” But again he ignored my request and continued playing, and now my recording of the moment will forever be tarnished by the sound of my own voice.
It was only later, when I played the recording for my wife, that I learned the tune he was playing was from Hamilton. It was the intro to Satisfied, which is a song that concludes with the lines, “And I know / He will never be satisfied / I will never be Satisfied.” I can’t say for sure that it meant anything, but I can say for sure he’s a genius.
Hamilton premieres at Spark Arena in Auckland on May 26 for a limited season. Tickets are available now from Ticketmaster.
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